Museu Municipal de Lagos (with Slavery Museum)

Museu Municipal de Lagos incorporates the site of the Mercado de Escravos, established in 1444 as the first purpose-built market in Europe for the sale of enslaved people brought from West Africa, marking the start of the transatlantic slave trade that Portugal pioneered under Prince Henry the Navigator. The museum occupies buildings around the Praça Infante Dom Henrique in Lagos's historic centre, combining archaeological and ethnographic collections with a dedicated exhibition on the slave market and the history of slavery in the Algarve. Displays include Roman mosaics and artefacts from the Lagos region, ecclesiastical art, model ships, and, in the slavery exhibition space, panels and objects documenting the market's operation, the routes of the slave trade, and its long-term social impact on Portugal and its colonies. The museum's approach is explicitly commemorative in the slavery section, treating the subject with historical seriousness rather than as an incidental footnote to the Age of Discoveries narrative found elsewhere in the region. The complex adjoins the Igreja de Santo António, whose interior is considered one of the finest examples of Baroque gilded woodwork in the Algarve, and a joint ticket typically covers both the museum and the church. Renovation of the museum and the slave market memorial space was completed in the 2010s to give the subject a more prominent and better-documented presentation.